Former French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe believes President Emmanuel Macron may be forced to leave office before his term expires, Politico has reported, citing anonymous sources. Philippe, who led the French government between 2017 and 2020, and now serves as mayor of Le Havre, earlier this week announced his plans to vie for the country’s top job in the next presidential election.     

Macron called a snap parliamentary vote in June following the poor showing by his centrist bloc in the European Parliament election. No party secured an outright majority, which has left France with a hung parliament.    

In an article on Wednesday, Politico quoted several unnamed senior members of the Horizons party as claiming that Philippe expects Macron not to be able to hold out until the end of his term in 2027.   

The former prime minister reportedly instructed his party to “be ready for a spring” in 2025 as he “considers that everything can move,” according to Politico.     

In an interview with Le Point on Tuesday, Philippe made it clear that he “would be a candidate for the next presidential election.” When asked whether he would be ready in case of an earlier election, he said “yes, I confirm it.” 

Meanwhile, in a post on X last Saturday, the parliamentary leader of the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party, Mathilde Panot, announced that the “draft resolution to initiate the procedure for the impeachment of the President of the Republic, in accordance with Article 68 of the Constitution, was sent today to parliamentarians for co-signatures.”   

The move came after Macron refused to appoint as prime minister the candidate proposed by the New Popular Front, the broad left-wing coalition that secured the largest share of seats in the parliamentary election. LFI is a member of the bloc.  

“Macron refuses to submit to the people’s vote, so we must dismiss him,” Panot explained, sharing the draft of the resolution, which stated that the “National Assembly (lower house) and Senate can and must defend democracy against the president’s authoritarian leanings.”  

To set the impeachment process in motion, the LFI, which has 72 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, must collect signatures from at least 10% of the members of parliament under its motion.

https://www.rt.com/news/603577-ex-french-pm-macrone-gone-2025/

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BY Mary Manley

In July, Macron accepted Attal’s resignation following the electoral defeat of the president’s political party. The country has now been without a cabinet for 60 days.

President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Michel Barnier, 73, a veteran right-wing politician who served twice as European Commissioner and played a major role in the 2016 Brexit Task Force, as the new prime minister of France as of Thursday. Macron is trying to break through a political impasse that has gripped France following the country’s snap legislative elections held in July.

The French presidency said in a statement that Macron is entrusting Barnier with “the task of forming a unity government to serve the country and the French people”, the New York Times reported. Barnier will take over the role from Gabriel Attal, France’s youngest ever prime minister who has held the position for the last eight months.

Phil Kelly, a Belfast-based political commentator and socialist activist, joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits Thursday to discuss Macron’s continued rejection of the French public’s desires.

“This is far from democracy. This is an absurdity,” said Kelly. “It's like a husband and wife debating over which electrician to hire to redo the wiring in your house not being able to come to an agreement and hiring a plumber. It's an affront, an absolute affront to the democratic will of the people.”

 “What Macron is doing is he's investing heavily in creating future problems because France is a powder keg. It is divided. The breakthrough for the left was good to see, but let's hope it's not a pyrrhic victory because what acts like this are doing is it just erodes faith that people have in their democratic institutions,” he added.

“It's a further sign that France is in dissent and chaos, that its establishment is flailing, that Macron is just trying to hold the door against change,” the analyst suggested. “But that change will come to France and I hope it's a positive change, but there's no guarantee there will be. The country's in a dark way.”

In March of last year France’s Senate passed a controversial reform bill to raise the retirement age for French citizens by two years. The Senate passed the bill by 195 votes to 112. Macron’s decision to push through a bill that is extremely unpopular among voters for the alleged sake of the economy clearly went unforgiven during July’s election. Business-friendly think tanks such as the pro-Macron Institut Montaigne claim Macron’s pension plan is more cost-effective than other proposals, but a majority of French voters reject the ploy.

“A country that is able to send billions of euros to the Kiev regime while its own citizens are offered a diet of, ‘we make you work longer for less’... and it's a bit like from his gilded palace in Paris. He's a bit like Macron Antoinette,” Kelly said.

“Macron [is] a guy who's deeply unpopular, who, at one point, was talking up the advantage of World War III to the French people, now clinging on desperately to power, trying to make the guy who lost who came forth the leader of the country and all, as you say, to cling on to his own power for a little bit longer and to try and push through a policy that is so deeply unpopular.”

In January, Macron claimed during a speech at the Swedish Defense Academy that the future security architecture of the continent could no longer be settled simply by the United States and that Europe should determine its own future.

In April, the French president said he would be willing to discuss using French nuclear warheads as a “credible European defense” against a supposed Russian threat. The French president previously hinted at the use of France’s nuclear weapons in 2020 and again in 2022. In March the leader alarmed other EU member states when he announced his openness to ground operations in Ukraine, saying it might be required “at some point”.

“It's not, unfortunately, only France that has this kind of political class,” Kelly added. “[There was] one of the ministers in the German government who's a member of the Green Party saying — I'm sure you remember this — ‘I don't care about German voters, I'll do whatever it takes to support Ukraine.’”

“This is why Europe is in decline. Much like your country where the political establishment has [nothing to] offer, it has no vision of how to move things forward, it only has 'how can we trick the electorate in the next election and then just do the same [thing],’” he explained.

Macron delayed appointing a new prime minister for a record period of time following a narrow victory for the leftwing New Popular Front in July. Over 80 lawmakers have signed a resolution calling for Macron to step down in the weeks since. The resolution was triggered by Macron’s decision to reject the New Popular Front’s candidacy of Lucie Castets for prime minister, even though the coalition won the most seats in July’s elections. 

“Macron is a fool. And he's a fool at the top of the hill at the minute. But he won't be there forever," said Kelly. "His day of reckoning will be coming. But he is sowing the seeds of a very, very bitter harvest in France because to destroy the public's faith in their democratic institutions so much, to support your own vanity project, is how democracies die.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240906/an-affront-to-the-democratic-will-macron-pushes-through-pm-pick-after-60-days-1120048204.html

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SEE ALSO: 

Le peuple de France ayant dit à Macron aux élections européennes, puis aux élections législatives que le pur-sang France ne devait plus être drivé par un vieux réac, le méprisant de la ripouxblique a écarté la fringante pouliche Castets qui piaffait dans son paddock, pour nommer un vieux cheval de retour, 50 ans de carrière politique, prêt à courir sous la casaque de Rothschild.

Plusieurs fois ministre et député, Michel Barnier a milité pour le recul de l’âge de la retraite de 62 à 65 ans, l’augmentation de la durée hebdomadaire du temps de travail et la création d’une aide sociale unique remplaçant les aides sociales et conditionnée à une disponibilité du bénéficiaire, notamment pour « effectuer des activités utiles à la collectivité ou en entreprise ».

Pour un ongulé, ce canasson est un bel ongulé, prêt à mordre et à ruer dès qu’il entend « volonté populaire, résultat des élections... ».

Quant à Mélenchon, il affirme que l’élection législative a été volée aux électeurs puisque le parti qui est arrivé troisième est hissé en haut du podium par Macron, tout seul comme un grand autocrate.

Je ne saurais trop conseiller à mes lecteurs ulcérés d’écouter nos journaleux pour s’extasier avec eux sur les extraordinaires qualités trop longtemps cachées de Barnier, son bilan injustement méconnu et pour se rappeler la parole de Jésus-Christ : « Les premiers seront les derniers, et les derniers seront les premiers ». 

Théophraste R. Auteur de l’ouvrage (en cours) :« Comment préférer la Rossinante de Don Quichotte au Tornado de Zorro ».

https://www.legrandsoir.info/

The people of France having told Macron in the European elections, then in the legislative elections that the thoroughbred France should no longer be driven by an old reactionary, the scornful CORRUPTBLICUS has dismissed the dashing filly Castets who was prancing around in her paddock, to name an old horse back, 50 years of political career, ready to run under the Rothschild jacket.
Several times minister and MP, Michel Barnier campaigned for the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 65, the increase in the weekly working time and the creation of a single social aid replacing social aid and conditional on the availability of the beneficiary, in particular to "carry out activities useful to the community or in business".
For an ungulate, this nag is a beautiful ungulate, ready to bite and kick as soon as it hears "popular will, election results...".
As for Mélenchon, he claims that the legislative election was stolen from the voters since the party that came third was hoisted to the top of the podium by Macron, all alone like a great autocrat.
I cannot advise my angry readers enough to listen to our journalists to rave with them about Barnier's extraordinary qualities that have been hidden for too long, his unjustly overlooked record and to remember the words of Jesus Christ: "The first will be last, and the last will be first".
Théophraste R. Author of the work (in progress): "How to prefer Don Quixote's Rocinante to Zorro's Tornado".

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Le gouvernement Barnier ou comment serrer encore la vis d’une cocote déjà sur le point d’exploser ?*

*The Barnier government or how to tighten the screws on a pressure cooker that is already about to explode?

Translation by Jules Letambour....

BY Georges GASTAUD

September 9, 2024 – The stubbornly reactionary and Euro-Atlanticist trajectory of the new Prime Minister, the seriously anti-democratic conditions of his appointment by Macron, very likely backroom arrangements between the RN and Macronie with a view to facilitating the parliamentary investiture of Michel Barnier, the enthusiastic support expressed by the chief Eurocrat Ursula von der Leyen for the Brexit negotiator that is the new Prime Minister, the latter’s unequivocal anti-social and neo-liberal statements on TF1 (how could Barnier “improve pension reform” when he is campaigning for retirement at 65?), the entry of LR Barnier into Matignon signifies a new qualitative leap in the anti-social, anti-national, liberticidal, xenophobic and warmongering orientation of the “French” oligarchy. This class and caste aggression is embodied by the alliance of Macronie, the LR and a right wing of the PS (like Cazeneuve or Delga) not very discreetly eager to join the government. All this is taking place against a backdrop of increasing Thatcherization of the RN, dropping its "social", "popular" and "patriotic" mask to rally the Euro-Atlanticist "construction", harden its xenophobic line and prepare the massive offensive against the social conquests brought about by the RN's attachment to the crudely Versailles wing of the LR, variously personified by Ciotti and Wauquiez.

There is therefore no illusion to be had about the composition of the new government, and the shabby complacent remarks of the CFTC, CFDT, UNSA leaders and other certified union supporters of the Maastricht "reforms" have no other aim than to divide the popular opposition that is essential to defend peace, national independence, social progress and democracy. What is the value of Barnier's chatter about "social dialogue" when this cunning character hammers home that he will prioritize the "truth about the debt", meaning the repayment of the "financial markets", the clear cuts decided by Brussels and NATO's warlike roadmap for Eastern Europe? Have employees already forgotten the pitiful defeat to which they were condemned in the spring of 2023 by the obstinacy of the jaundiced Laurent Berger and the euro-"united unionism" in refusing to build the blockage of capitalist profit, to criticize the EU - the main sponsor with the MEDEF of the pension counter-reform! -, to contest the ruinous race for over-armament... and to endlessly palaver with a deaf and violent government, adept at the truncheon, the taser and the 49/3 repeatedly? In reality, the undemocratic terms of Barnier’s appointment, the fact that he came to power by sitting on the result of the legislative elections and bypassing the majority clamor of the country demanding a return to retirement at 60, the fact that Barnier could not be invested in Parliament without the benevolent abstention of the Le Penists and that his real mission is to apply without flinching the enormous program of clear cuts (110 billion budget cuts in two years!) planned by Brussels to feed the NATO arms race while prioritizing the international usurers of the financial markets (the sacrosanct “debt”), all this shows that the “French” oligarchy is getting into battle order to brutally confront the enormous crisis of popular legitimacy that it is undergoing. Therein lies the deep class source of the current fascisation of which the Le Penist breakthrough is both a cause and an effect. Also in a crisis of legitimacy, the Fifth “Republic” corseted by Maastricht with in the background the denial by the “elites” of the popular No to the European Constitution (2007), the unresolved crisis of the Yellow Vests (2019), the twelve 49/3 opposed by Borne* to the popular movement for pensions (2023), the majority refusal of the French – all the polls show it! – to let Macron send French ground troops to Ukraine at the risk of making France an official co-belligerent suicidally confronting one of the main nuclear powers in the world!

Faced with this explosive crisis of legitimacy that could well end in a mass popular uprising, Macron is calling on all the country's reactionaries, whether proven or hidden, including Cazeneuve, Delga, Edouard Philippe or Valls, he is trampling on democracy, he is accentuating the ongoing fascisation and is tasking the new government with preparing the "European federal leap", that is to say the definitive killing of national independence, without forgetting the "high intensity global conflict" planned by the US and its vassals against the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean peoples, and, from now on, against the Cuban, Palestinian and other African or Latin American countries fighting against neocolonialism. As for the MEDEF, it is faced with a delicate situation: on the one hand, its president, Patrick Martin, and its ex-president Roux de Bézieux, with whom Fabien Roussel and Bernard Thibault cynically have their photos taken, know full well that the country no longer wants austerity and low wages. On the other hand, global capitalist competition and the race for maximum profit to which the capitalist crisis is forcing capitalist employers, leads the MEDEF to demand from the government a clear acceleration in the destruction of the French "social model" that emerged from the Liberation. Edouard Philppe is preparing for this by promising that what he will propose during the next presidential election will be "massive".

In short, we are heading towards a redoubled national and international class war against the backdrop of decadent, and therefore all the more aggressive, US hegemonism, the growing illegitimacy of the supranational EU-NATO, the open collusion of Euro-Atlantic forces with the fascists, even with the Nazis (the pro-Nazi and Bandera regime in Kiev is a continental test bed) and, more fundamentally still, the incapacity of capitalism in latent crisis to assume the leadership of the world without leading humanity towards the abyss: such is the exterminist dimension of modern capitalism-imperialism-hegemonism.

At the same time, this enormous crisis of popular consent at all levels, global, European and national – starting with the US, where the confrontation between the two “democratic” and “republican” wings of the plutocracy is taking place at daggers drawn – opens up vast spaces for vast popular counter-attacks. And this is all the more true since, on a global scale, the Ukrainian-NATO army threatens to collapse, Russia and the People's Republic of China are strengthening their ties, the "BRICS" are working serenely to "de-dollarize" the world economy, the genocidal Israeli army, despite being fed high-tech weapons by Washington and Berlin, is unable to subdue the Palestinian people, Cuba and the other countries of the Alba are vigorously resisting the Yankee strangulation operation, and the peoples of Africa are shaking off the French neocolonial yoke. And above all, the working class and the international proletariat, once stunned by the counter-revolution in the USSR, are going back on the offensive with very tough and often victorious mass strikes, from India to the US, from Great Britain to Quebec, from Mexico to Bangladesh, not to mention the Korean workers at Samsung.

However, it is not enough for things to boil very strongly in the social cauldron for popular revolutions to necessarily emerge if, moreover, globally and nationally, there are no strong communist and Marxist-Leninist vanguards associated with large red unions as well as large anti-imperialist movements. The ever-fertile belly of capital in crisis is always capable of giving birth to the worst, whether it is a world hegemonic war or neo-fascists nostalgic for Mussoliniism, Banderism, Pétainism or Nazism, such as the Ukrainian Hitlerite francs of Azov who are holding Zelensky in their hands or the AFD which has just made a breakthrough in East Germany. To speak only of our country, who does not see that the underground machinations of Macron and the RN, probably closely followed by the Big Brothers of the EU, are paving the way for Le Pen in the next presidential election, with perhaps as a bonus the arrival of the hateful Ciotti at Matignon? Who does not now see better that we will not be able to change this country, whatever the leaders of the Maastricht Socialist Party, the Euro-ecologists prey to anti-Russian vertigo, the Euro-"communists" endorsed by the MEDEF and, alas, increasingly, the Euro-submissives to Manon Aubry, may say, by remaining in the bosom of an EU synonymous with complete republican unraveling, a single European currency driving perpetual austerity, a NATO instigator of world war, a Fifth Republic worn to the bone, an impossible cohabitation with Macron and a capitalism that has systemically become a destroyer of life and humanity?

Si modestes que soient les forces, cependant en dynamique, du PRCF et de la JRCF, la voie qu’ils proposent est celle, révolutionnaire et rassembleuse à la fois, d’une large Unité populaire, pacifique, patriotique, environnementaliste et antifasciste centrée sur le monde du travail et la jeunesse populaire, combattant pour une France libre, sociale et fraternelle : une France osant (re-)nationaliser les secteurs-clés de notre économie, sortir de l’UE-OTAN par la porte à gauche, unir les ouvriers de toutes origines et rouvrir à notre pays, s’il en fait le choix démocratique, la voie d’un socialisme-communisme de nouvelle génération à notre pays.

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BY Ian DeMartino

For years the neoliberal ruling class in Europe has warned about what they describe as the far-right parties in their countries. They cautioned that parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the National Rally (RN) in France represent a dangerous and potentially violent swing toward fascism.

Despite years of hand-wringing about the populist right in Europe, the elite in many European nations have proven their preference for those groups over any momentum by leftists who will implement policies that will match the EU’s liberal marketing materials.

The EU presents itself as a beacon of democracy, with free speech and a vehement commitment to human rights. But their actions have never matched that propaganda.

“What we're witnessing is the failure of the European dream, if you like. The idea of this community of nations, which at its heart was always a neoliberal financial cabal. And, it's failing. It's falling apart,” explained Phil Kelly, a Belfast-based political commentator and socialist activist told Sputnik’s Political Misfits. “It hasn't delivered in its kind of mythical promises. And the reality of what it's producing is increasingly stark economic failure and decline and declining living standards.”

In France, President Emmanuel Macron appointed centrist-right Michel Barnier as prime minister. Barnier’s party came in fifth during the national elections. The New Popular Front, the leftist party that came in first place, offered several prime minister candidates to Macron, but they were refused. While the French left have drawn up impeachment documents against Macron, the leader of the RN, Marine Le Pen, gave her tacit approval for the Barnier appointment. The sign is clear: Macron will negotiate with the RN, but not the left.

“This guy is an EU stooge, the blandest of the bland, you know, somebody that was probably spawned in a laboratory in Brussels, whose veins pump with blue EU blood. Not someone chosen by the people,” Kelly said of Barnier.

“If France is going down a route with Macron…where he desperately clings to power, clings to preserve his own position for a little longer, the legacy of that is to sow a bitter harvest that one day he will have to deal with, and that is that you're making an enemy of the French people by denying democracy,” Kelly concluded, dubbing Macron “Marie Macronette” as an “isolated political establishment with no connection to the people.”

In Germany, after three people were fatally stabbed at a street festival by a Syrian man who said he was inspired by ISIS* German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party all but adopted the AfD’s immigration policy, closing its borders and ending, at least temporarily, the Schengen-Visiting Zone, which since 1985 has allowed visa-free travel between most EU countries.

“While the kind of conservative center parties and the liberal elites within Europe won't use the extreme rhetoric that you hear from the AfD or Le Pen and France or other far-right groups, their actions really demonstrate that they are the same,” argued Kelly. “And any serious student of history will tell you and understand fully that at times of crisis, liberals will always align with fascists, and that's exactly what we're seeing.”

As the adage goes, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.

Kelly pointed to the ruling parties in Europe allowing migrants to drown in the Mediterranean, supporting terrorist groups in Syria in an attempt to overthrow a sovereign state, supporting and arming neo-fascists in the Ukrainian military, and the support of genocide against the Palestinian people as evidence that the center-left and center-right parties are, at best, no better than the populist right that they say they fear. “Certainly, the blood soaking their hands is as thick and probably more splattered across their faces than anyone else,” Kelly said.

"This political establishment are every bit as racist, every bit as despicable as the brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs that they tell you to be scared of. They're one and the same, they rely on each other," he added.

As Europe was falling, Germany, previously the industrial heart of Europe, made no real protest when the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged. Many, including Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, pointed their fingers at the United States. Yet Germany –like many EU nations– continues to function as an extension of the United States.

“At that moment, Germany really revealed itself to be a vassal state to the US,” argued Kelly. “You only have to think about the Nord Stream bombing, which devastated the German economy. And yet, the German government, as it pains, said it doesn’t really want to know who is behind that.”

Faced with a failing economy and ineffectual leaders, it is not uncommon for people to turn to populism. The question is what brand of populism they will gravitate towards, right-wing or leftist. Unfortunately, the right wing has gotten a head start in Europe.

“My worry here is that Germans who’ve seen their economy collapse, who’ve seen industrial giants like Volkswagen start to struggle, all as a result of the boomerang effect of sanctions and following blindly the US military and economic policy, that’s creating the problem, but you have a narrative where migrants are the scapegoat in Germany,” argued Kelly. "[Germany's] history proves it's a great fan of the scapegoat."

“The left [in Europe] must find itself in the dark,” Kelly continued. “It needs to stop the circus because a left opposition to this wave of reaction is neither a rainbow postmodernist, clown twerking, to quote from Judith Butler, nor is it a kind of brown-shirted, goose-stepping clown juggling hammer and sickle, where you have a left that kind of masquerades itself as some kind of left-wing fascism.”

Instead, the left needs to focus on economic issues if it wants to stand against the momentum of the right. “This is where we need class-based politics… to be connected to the people, but that connection is not strong enough in Germany. And I hope the [Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a new leftist party recently launched in Germany] gains ground. I hope it gains momentum because that’s where hope would arise,” concluded Kelly, noting earlier that he did not agree with their migration policies that somewhat mirror the AfD’s.

“But at the moment, the clouds on the horizon are the AfD, and a political establishment who are opening the doors, as I said, and rolling out the red carpet for them to either march into power or have such an influence on the government that it’s indistinguishable,” Kelly warned.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240921/scratch-a-liberal-european-elite-swings-right-to-crush-the-left-1120232539.html

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